The Sixth Man Page 4
“Springfield is a place,” she told me once, “that if you’re not careful, you can get stuck here.” I didn’t ask her what she meant by that. I didn’t have to. I could just look in her eyes and tell. I love where I grew up. And I love what it gave me. But something deep inside me would whisper at night, “If you don’t do everything you possibly can, you’ll be stuck here for the rest of your life.” And I knew, from a very early age, that I just could not live with that.
02
Confidence
Like life, basketball is a beautiful and complicated game. A game with choreography and wrinkles, and endless motion and adjustments. It’s a game of instinct and telepathy and kinesthesia. It’s a game in which five people begin to think as one person, and human beings sense and react to each other’s movements even seconds before they are made. When it’s played at its best level, it’s a ten-person magic show where we wow the spectators with feats that defy explanation, no-look passes, shots made from impossible angles. At its best, it’s a game of alchemy.
But it’s also a brutal game. A game of pounding joints and crushing bones, ligaments ripped and healed crooked, noses broken, joints dislocated. It happens fast and without apology, and once you step onto the floor of a real game, it does not wait for you. Either you run it or you get run over by it. That’s why ultimately basketball is a game of personal mettle and nerve. You have to decide every moment that you are on a court that you have every right to be there and every right to make decisions there. More than anything, basketball is a game of confidence.
There are good players and great players, but the technical distance between the best player in the NBA and the worst player in the NBA is really not that big. Everyone can shoot, everyone can dribble, everyone can pass, and everyone is strong. So confidence is really the thing that makes the difference between winning and losing. When I look back at my career, I can see now that each milestone I hit wasn’t so much a milestone of technical ability, though there were those. They were really milestones of personal belief. Which means that they were moments when I had to believe in myself despite the fact that someone else was committed to making sure I didn’t.
* * *
—
On the first day of seventh grade I walked into my first-period classroom. We had been given our bell schedule the day before, and I was excited to sit down and get started on a new year. I had been playing basketball and baseball and was starting to be interested in clothes and girls. Seventh grade held a certain kind of promise. I was going to play on the team, I had a little rep around town as something of a baller. And to top it off, I had on some crisp new gear, had a fresh haircut, and was looking to make an impression. This would be a good year.
I knew something was off, because when I walked into the room, I noticed that all the other kids were white. My middle school was fairly diverse, at least as far as black and white students went. And up until that point, it always seemed that every class I was in was at least somewhere between 20 and 30 percent black.
Even though it was unusual for me to be in an all-white class, there was a simple explanation for it today. I had been placed in the honors track. I didn’t yet think a lot about why it was that the honors track meant all white students except for me. It just seemed like that’s the way it was. I was more serious than most of the people I knew and was growing up around. I had been raised that way. And in no small part because of my mother’s discipline about reading, my grandmother’s lessons about behavior, and all my personal drive to be the best that I could possibly be, I was one of the kids in school chosen for advanced education. This meant I would get to do advanced projects, have extra privileges, and just generally achieve at a high level. I was excited.
But when I walked into the room, the teacher stopped me almost immediately.
“I think you might be in the wrong classroom, dear,” she said.
“Nope. Right one.”
I still wasn’t really aware of what was happening. Obviously, I had read my schedule and knew which classroom I was supposed to go to. That’s just basic. Still, she seemed unconvinced.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure, ha-ha.” This whole thing was silly. I was already headed for a seat, thinking this little interaction was over. But it wasn’t for her. She followed behind me.
“Can you show me your schedule, hon?” she said. This time she seemed a little more forceful.
It was then that I started to understand.
I presented her the schedule I had crumpled in my hand.
She looked it over for a moment. “Ah. OK,” she said quietly. “Take your seat then.”
I sat down slowly, reality dawning on me. Did that just happen? Did I really get asked to show my papers? In my own school? I looked around. Only a few kids had noticed. The rest were too busy catching up on the first day, talking and laughing while we waited for the bell to ring. My skin was hot. My heart was beating fast. The bell rang. I sat quietly and opened my notebook.
Race was not something that I became aware of in a moment. It was something that built slowly in my understanding of the world. I didn’t run around when I was three years old thinking, “I’m black!” None of us do. Everything in my world seemed normal. My friends, family, community—these were the regular people. Our lives unfolded in a normal way. We had our own society filled with all kinds of people. And we thought it represented the entire world. Some of us were kind, some were rougher. Some were honest, some were tricky. Some were quick-witted or emotionally intelligent, some were slow thinking or oblivious. All of us were black. It didn’t seem that our lives were organized around white people, or what they thought of us or could do to us. If I had any consciousness of white people, it was simply that they were somewhere else. They were “over there.”
But as I grew, that changed, slowly but certainly. The freedom to be unaware of racism simply doesn’t last long if you’re black.
For one thing, my mother was not shy to bring it up. It was an important part of how she prepared us for the world and kept us safe. When we were growing up, it became clear that much of her guidance about behavior, respect, and self-control was really about how to steer clear of police officers, who, she knew, could be incredibly racist and harmful in the Midwest. It’s funny to see in the past few years what many Americans are referring to as a sudden jump in racially motivated police brutality. But growing up in the 1980s and ’90s, we took this for granted as a fact of life. Police may help you, but they may also hurt you. And the way you behaved didn’t really have a lot to do with it. Good kids could catch a police beatdown just as quickly as the bad kids could. The best strategy was to steer clear of them altogether, because you just never knew.
We were raised to be respectful in general because my mother calculated that this attitude, if we held it deeply enough, could keep us out of the line of sight of law enforcement. But the struggle most of us face as black people is that respect gets you only so far. There are just as many times in which you have to be aggressive and fearless, in which you have to not back down or cower in the face of people who would like to keep you in check. I’ve told you how my mother would get if you pressed her. Well, part of that is that black women have to be that way, otherwise people are always going to be pressing them. America is always going to be pressing you.
My grandmother represented a somewhat earlier version of this balance. She was one of the few people in those early years of my life who seemed to interact regularly with white people. She would often take me with her to pick up vegetables from local farmers, who were almost always white. As an avid food gardener herself, she emphasized farm-to-table before that was even a thing. So oftentimes you could find her chatting it up with some white dude with rough hands and a dirty flannel shirt, talking about the soil this year or which way the weather would be coming in from. She was a woman from the South and of an older generation, so she was capab
le of getting along with everybody. Southern women of that age have a certain kind of magic with that. They can crack a joke and fix you with a smile that makes everything feel peaceful and easy.
But the truth about both of these women was that they would not hesitate to lay down the law with quickness and authority if you stepped out of line. They knew that they had to.
So I grew up learning a balance. On the one hand, it was “Yes, ma’am. No, sir.” On the other hand, it was a deep sense that you simply couldn’t let people fuck with you.
It seems to me, as a black man, that the rest of the world has a very hard time making sense of you if you have both these qualities in equal measure. When a black man is wild and unbridled, cursing every other word and breaking all the rules, then in an odd way the world is comfortable with that. They may complain about him, but they can write him off as a product of “the ghetto.” They see him as uneducated, unfit to play by the rules they’ve set, to deal with the world they’ve created. He may be threatening to some minor extent, but if he gets too far out of line, there’s a whole prison system designed to contain him. As a criminal, he represents no real systemic menace because he fits well within the expectations of white America. They can write him off. “Sure, he’s talented,” they may say, “but he’s too street to ever have any real power.”
Conversely, when a black man is respectable and buttoned up, when he speaks the language of white America with ease, when he blends in too well, never challenging, never threatening, then he buys himself a (very provisional) pass into whiteness. He goes to the right kind of school and holds the right kind of views, and white America embraces him with open arms because he, too, is not a threat. They know, albeit perhaps subconsciously, that his life (and privileges) are conditional, held in place by a tenuous social contract. His life is based on their acceptance. And he would be unwilling to risk that by deeply, publicly, and unapologetically challenging whiteness.
Both these ways of being in the white world are easily understood and, I think, represent a kind of comfort for many white people. But for structural racism, trouble comes in the form of a third kind of black person: the one who knows who they are and where they come from, who is unafraid to challenge the status quo and say things that make everyone’s inner racist a little uncomfortable, but who also has their shit together, who is well read and well informed, who is unlikely to be squirreled away in a prison or rendered voiceless behind walls of poverty, who cannot be written off as uneducated or “thugged out.” This, in my experience, is the kind of black person who represents the greatest threat to oppressive systems. At least it seems that way. Because I’ve learned that if you are in this third category, a lot of white people don’t know what to make of you. And for the sake of their comfort, they pressure you, and hard, to be either one or the other.
This is not all stuff I had fully realized that morning in seventh grade. The consciousness was beginning, but it was not even close to having been formed. That morning in that classroom, being asked to, essentially, show my papers activated only one impulse in me: competition. If someone doubted me, then I would prove them wrong. That day, that teacher doubted me in a most fundamental way. She doubted my right to even be in the room. So that teacher and that idea—the idea that I don’t even have a right to be in that room—is what I would spend the rest of my life proving wrong. And in small ways and in big ways, whether I wanted it to or not, race would be a silent but powerful guiding force that exerted its pressure on every step for the rest of my journey.
In a certain sense, it began before I was born, with a mother who knew that the two boys she loved had to earn extra levels of achievement just to stay safe and alive. And with a grandmother who grew up knowing about lynching, about the deep cruelty that could come from racism, and therefore learned how to get along with everyone, how to keep the ugliness at bay. They raised us with that. It was in our lives, every word was laced with it, and maybe in a sense it was even in our genetics. But for me, in another sense, it began in that moment in seventh grade when I learned that just standing in a certain room, complete and unafraid, was enough to make certain people uncomfortable. I didn’t take it personally. I didn’t internalize it or take is as subtle but inescapable proof that I was less than. How could I when I was raised by a mother who would sock a person in the face without a word just as quickly as she would go an entire winter without a coat to make sure her boys stayed warm? When you’re taught this kind of confidence, you know better than to take some random woman’s racism personally. Instead, I took it as a challenge.
You have to take it as a challenge. The alternative is too dark and too scary. This country is designed to wreak absolute havoc on the confidence of black people. You grow up learning over and over again about how people like you have been murdered and enslaved, and how they continue to be. You want to tell yourself that it’s over and that that’s not going to happen to you. But there are little moments all day long that come out of nowhere and remind you that you’re not in charge and that the people in charge don’t like you, and so you can never be 100 percent safe. Like a teacher looking at you not as if you are a student but as if you are a problem. Just because you happen to have good-enough grades to be in her class. And if you stop to think about that too much, if you let that feeling start to settle into your blood and bones, it’s hard to recover from. You have to learn confidence. You have to own it. Or else you won’t survive.
* * *
—
One of the earliest and most important basketball influences in my life was Coach Lawrence Thomas. A short, dark-skinned man with a serious demeanor and large, sensitive eyes, he was both my very first Boys & Girls Club coach and an assistant coach of my junior varsity team at Lanphier High School. Coach Thomas has devoted his life to training young men to be basketball players. Which is to say he trains us to be disciplined and courageous. He’s still coaching to this day, and I have had the opportunity to mentor and work with his son, bringing it full circle. But my earliest memories of him go back to when I was about eight years old. We were all scared of him because he seemed like someone who didn’t have a lot of patience for fooling around. But the more we got to know him, the more he became like a father figure to all of us. He knew all our parents, waved to everyone around town. He was like the little mayor of black Springfield. He wasn’t perfect, but he had integrity and respect.
He used to gas me up when I was in the third grade. “This kid gonna be in the NBA!” he would say when I was running down the floor just trying to keep the ball from slipping out of my control. I tried to pretend like that kind of stuff didn’t matter. But every time he said it, I had to work to keep the smile from spreading across my face.
Everything Coach Thomas said carried some weight because he was tight with Kevin Gamble. Gamble was a legend to us. A six-foot-five guard out of Lanphier High School, Kevin was on those Celtics teams with Bird, McHale, and Dennis Johnson. Gamble’s NBA career started when he was called out of the Canadian League after Bird was injured in November 1988. He ended up dropping 31 in the final game of that season. He went on to play ten years in the league in almost 650 games, averaging 9.5 points per game on 50 percent shooting. As far as we were concerned, this was fairy-tale stuff. Hearing a guy who coached Gamble telling me that I was going to play in the league was quite the boost! Stuff like that made me want to work harder. I still didn’t believe that I was going to go to the league, but when a coach has your respect and supports you, you kind of don’t want to disappoint him.
In middle school, Coach Brewer was another important person in developing my confidence. He was maybe the second person outside my family who treated me like he saw real, genuine potential in me. I first met him in seventh grade, and honestly I didn’t think he liked me. He was not rough, per se, but businesslike. And he was funny. He would gently roast kids and make everyone crack up. He didn’t act like basketball was serious. I think he knew that most of
us just liked running around and pretending to be Jordan, and for the most part he was fine with that. He was realistic about what it meant to coach middle school basketball. He just wanted us to learn some basics of how to play and defend—and mostly to stay out of trouble. A thing I noticed about Coach Brewer was that he really seemed to like us. A lot of middle school teachers come off as if they’re tolerating the kids. But Coach Brewer seemed to actually enjoy our enthusiasm and playfulness. He didn’t make you feel like you had to be someone other than who you were, and I appreciated that.
Still, I don’t think I caught Brewer’s attention until the first report period was done and I got straight As on my report card. I’m not sure, but I might have been the only kid on the team who did that. I remember him coming up to me in the hallway soon after.
“Your grades. They’re good!” He seemed almost surprised.
“Yes, thanks, Coach.”
“Yeah, well . . . keep it up.”
It was a small exchange, but it felt important because things changed noticeably between me and him after that. He was a little harder on me in practice but also more generous with his time. It was like he was suddenly taking me seriously. We would work extra drills together, and I started to make a habit of hanging around his office after school even on days when we didn’t have practice. Sometimes he and I would just sit on the bleachers and talk about everything in the world except basketball. School, girls, politics, growing up. It wasn’t what we talked about that mattered so much. It was the fact that we talked at all. That was really the difference.
See, any kind of greatness takes work. Everyone knows that. But what fewer people understand is that work itself takes faith. You have to have faith that the work you’re doing will bring about results, otherwise you’ll lose interest. Coaches like Brewer and Thomas made sure that I saw a direct relationship between my work and the results. That’s what their encouragement was. The fact that Coach Brewer took a moment to notice my grades and started treating me differently afterward, started investing time in me, made me feel like my work had value. The fact that Coach Thomas always had a kind word for me, always told me that he believed in me, made me feel like I was doing something right. That’s what I had a hard time explaining to my brother. It was true that you didn’t have to work to graduate or get by. But you had to work to see results. That was my theory, at least. But Coaches Brewer and Thomas made sure that theory was proven true.